Baym, Nina. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter Fifth Edition. New York: Norton, 1999.

American Literature between the Wars, 1914-1945

The modern temper was also shaped by forces internal to the United States that had long been at work but whose pace quickened between the wars. Urbanization, industrialization, immigration—these general terms encapsulate huge demographic shifts in the nation: from country to city, from farm to factory, from native-born to new citizen. Technological evolution was another part of the mix. The telephone and electricity, nineteenth-century inventions, now expanded into American homes at large. They made life more comfortable and interesting for many and changed the nature of the gap between better- and worse-off Americans. Those without electricity and phones were, literally, out of the network. The phonograph record and the record / player—devices for playing recorded music—the motion picture, which acquired sound in 1929, and the radio made for a new kind of connectedness, and a new kind of culture, which we call mass or popular culture. Television and the computer did not arrive on the scene until the end of World War II. 1800

By far the most powerful technological influence between the wars came from the automobile. 1800

Back in the 1830s, the French social commentator Alexis de Tocqueville pointed to continual movement, lack of tradition, and rootlesssness as characteristics of American life. Now it could be more truly said than ever before that the United States was a nation, not so much of immigrants, but of migrants. 1800

Just as the interwar period has authentic historical specificity, so too does each of the two decades it encompasses, the 1920s and the 1930s. In 1929 the New York stock market crashed (in fact, the crash was worldwide), putting millions of Americans out of work and obliterating the life savings of many others. Throughout the 1930s, Americans struggled to restore or restructure the nation’s economy. The 1920s saw great struggles over such concerns as personal freedom, social permissiveness, the pursuit of pleasure, and the results of new affluence. 1800

The Eighteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, forbidding the “manufacture, sale or transportation of intoxicating liquors” was ratified in January 1919. It was widely and openly ignored. Some historians believe that Prohibition opened the door to organized crime, and certainly the phenomenon of the “gangster” arose in the 1920s in connection with bootleg liquor, which organized crime was ready to transport and supply to otherwise law-abiding citizens. The amendment was finally perceived to be unenforceable and was repealed in 1933. The gangster, however, persisted in American life and became a central figure, sometimes a hero, sometimes a villain, int eh movies and in the hard-boiled fiction of the 1930s. 1800

The 1920s also saw significant changes in sexual mores. The middle-class double-standard had always granted considerable sexual freedom to men; now women—enfranchised politically by the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, passed in August 1920 after more than seventy years of suffragist agitation, and also liberated by automobiles and new job possibilities—began to deman similar freedoms for themselves. The demand went far beyond erotic behavior: it encompassed education, professional work, mobility, and whatever else seemed like a social benefit reserved / for men alone. 1801

The 1920s was also a decade in which African Americans made themselves a permanent part of the nation’s cultural life. In 1915, as a direct result of the industrial needs of World War I, opportunities opened for African Americans in the factories of the North, and the so-called Great Migration out of the South began. Once in the North, African Americans faced the problems of adjusting from rural to urban ways, problems vastly compounded by racism, by segregated occupations and neighborhoods. Still, there was comparative economic improvement and an increase in personal freedom for African Americans who went north. 1801

Visitors to the Soviet Union returned with glowing reports about a true workers’ democracy and prosperity for all. The appeal of communism was significantly enhanced by its claim to be an opponent of fascism. 1801

But Soviet communism showed another side to Americans when Josef Stalin, the Soviet dictator, instituted a series of brutal purges in the Soviet Union beginning in 1936 and then in 1939 signed a pact promising not to go to war against Germany. 1801

The most important development in the period before the wars was certainly the growth of modern science. At the turn of the century and soon afterward scientists became aware that the atom was not the smallest possible unit of matter, that matter was not indestructible, that both time and space were relative to an observer’s position, that some phenomena were so small that attempts at measurement would alter them, that some outcomes could be predicted only in terms of statistical probability, that the universe might be infinite in size and yet infinitely expanding; in short, much of the commonsense basis of nineteenth-century science had to be put aside in favor of far more powerful but also far more complicated theories. Among many results, scientists and literary intellectuals became less and less able to communicate with each other and less respectful of each others’ worldview. 1802

Scientists saw literary people as careless thinkers; literary people, especially the more conservative among them, deplored the loss of authority for traditional, humanistic explanations of the real, concrete, experienced world and the felt human life. 1802

The two thinkers whose ideas had the greatest impact on the period were the Austrian Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and the German Karl Marx (1818-1883), both of whom tried to create far-reaching sciences of the human. 1802

Marx provided an analysis of human behavior opposed to Freud’s, yet both seemed to espouse a kind of determinism that, although counter to long-standing American beliefs in free will and free choice, also seemed better able to explain the terrible things that were happening in the twentieth century. 1802

In the 1920s American Marxists, Socialists, anarchists, and radicals, along with union organizers, were often subject to violence. The most dramatic instance of this was the so-called Sacco-Vanzetti case. 1803

modernism. Used in the broadest sense, it is a catchall phrase for any kind of literary production in the interwar period that deals with the modern world. More narrowly, it refers to work that represents the breakdown of traditional society under the pressures of modernity. Much modernist literature of this sort (which critics now call “high modernism”) is actually antimodern; it interprets modernity as an experience of loss. As one can tell from its title, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land—the great poem of the movement—represents the modern world as a scene of ruin. 1803

The American public was introduced to modern art at the famous New York Armory Show of 1913, which featured cubist paintings and caused an uproar. 1803

At the heart of the modernist aesthetic lay the conviction that the previously sustaining structures of human life, whether social, political, religious, or artistic, had been either destroyed of shown up as falsehoods or fantasies. To the extent that art incorporated such a false order, it had to be renovated. Order, sequence, and unity in works of art might well be considered only expressions of a desire for coherence rather than actual reflections of reality. Generalization, abstraction, and high-flown writing might conceal rather than convey the real. The form of a story, with its beginnings, complications, and resolutions, might be mere artifice imposed on the flux and fragmentation of experience. 1803

The subject matter of modernist writing often became, by extensions, the poem or literary work itself. Ironically—because this subject matter was motivated by deep concern about the interrelation of literature and life—this subject often had the effect of limiting the audience for a modernist work. The difficulty of this new type of writing also limited the appeal of modernism: clearly, difficult works about poetry are not candidates for best-sellers. Nevertheless, over time, the principles of modernism became increasingly influential. 1804

The inclusion of all sorts of material previously deemed “unliterary” in works of high seriousness involved the use of language that would also previously have been thought improper, including representations of the speech of the uneducated and the inarticulate, the colloquial, slangy, and the popular. The traditional educated literary voice, conveying truth and culture, lots its authority; this is what Ernest Hemingway had in mind when he asserted that the American literary tradition began with Huckleberry Finn. 1804

The reading audience in America was vast, but it preferred a kind of book quite different from that turned out by literary modernists: tales of romance or adventure, historical novels, crime fiction, and westerns became popular modes that enjoyed a success the serious writer could only dream of. The problem was that often he or she did dream of it; unrealistically, perhaps, the Ezra Pounds of the era imagined themselves with an audience of millions. When, on occasion, this dream came true—as it did for F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway—writers often accused themselves of having sold out. 1805

Because modernism was an international movement, it seemed to some to conflict with the American tradition in literature and hence was by no means automatically accepted by American writers. To some, the frequent pessimism, nostalgia, and conservatism of the movement made it essentially unsuited to the progressive, dynamic culture that they believed to be distinctive of this nation. To many others, modernist techniques were exciting and indispensable but required adaptation to specifically American topics and to the goal of contributing to a uniquely American literature. Thus artists who may be thought of as modernists in one context—Hart Crane or William Carlos Williams, for example—must be thought of as traditional American writers in another, since they wanted to write “American” works as such. And a profoundly modern writer like William Faulkner cannot be extricated from his commitment to writing about his native South. 1805

expatriates like Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, H. D., and T. S. Eliot . . . these writers left the United States because they found the country singularly lacking in a tradition of high culture and indifferent, if not downright hostile, to artistic achievement. They also believed that a national culture could never be more than parochial. 1806

Those writers who came back, however, and those who never left took very seriously the task of integrating modernist ideas and methods with American subject matter. Many writers chose to identify themselves with the American scene and to root their work in a specific region. 1806

Something akin to regionalism can be seen in the surge of literary expressiveness of black Americans. In the 1920s the area of New York City called Harlem, whose population had been swelled both by black New Yorkers moving “uptown” and by southern newcomers, became a center for black cultural activities. The so-called Harlem Renaissance involved the attempt of African American artists in many media to develop a strong cultural presence in America, both to demonstrate that black artists could equal white artists in their achievements and to articulate their own cultural traditions and values. 1806

Healthy changes in American theater are often in reaction against Broadway, a pattern observable as early as 1915 with the formation of the Washington Square Players and the Provincetown Players, both located in New York’s Greenwich Village and both dedicated to the production of plays that more conservative managers refused. The Provincetown Players would short be producing the first works of Eugene O’Neill. 1808

[O’Neill] experimented less in language than in dramatic structure and in new production methods available through technology (e. g., lighting) or borrowed from the stylized realism of German expressionism. 1808